I spent a fascinating evening on Apr 7th, listening to Esther Dyson talk to a room full of well fed hungry minds at the CIO meetup, organized by Tatanya Kanzaveli who brings her unique touch to her events in the valley. CIOTech's official blog post is here.
I was supposed to have met Esther in 1999 when my investor of my first startup Coola said, "you are sitting on a big idea, go find Esther Dyson in NY or Chris Shipley in CA". Chris replied to my email and I launched Coola at DEMO and am lucky for @cshipley's friendship and for Demo Conference to set the bar high about launch for me.
I went to finally meet Esther and got my answer, she had taken her vacation in 1999 after 20 years right when I tried reaching her in 1999!!!
Esther is an amazing person so full of intellectual warmth and passion for all the topics she covered. My attempt to capture the mesmerizing evening is here. It was a free Q&A style event and I have 15 video clips of each q&a here (low sound quality because of my iphone and good video quality because of Qik) See official video of the full event below:
Social media
- Social Media has been a latent urge like our biological urge to spread our presence all over the web at all times. eg. news feeds show your picture you posted to friends even while you sleep
- Search is God's gift to marketers. Social media is about listening without imposing their message which marketers are still learning.
- Sponsorship is the right opportunity in social
- Its amazing how people endorse a brand using social media, that means marketers get to hear good and bad.
Space
- Amazing stuff. She wants to goto Mars ofcourse.
- Lot of discussion about space travel, her experience training to goto space and dreams for earth to colonize Mars.
- Fascinating views on how we should make a controlled test environment on mars and come back and reclaim earth as there are too many vested interests that won't allow us to do the right thing to save earth for all of our species today.
Opening up healthcare data
- Esther is passionate about this and has some investments in this space.
- Lot of discussion about disintermediating healthcare as a business by getting healthcare data online.
- Esther is from Russia and shared stories of her investment fund and her views on Russia as an entrepreneurial bed and how it was transparent about its opaqueness.
